In New York City, a book would never get removed from a school library if just one parent or educator complained about it, LaVerde explained. A complaint initiates a formal process, wherein the first step is requesting that the challenger read the book from cover to cover (many parents who balk at certain titles do so because “they looked over a kid’s shoulder and, excuse my language, they saw the word ‘fuck.’ Or they saw the word ‘sex,’ ” she said). If they’re still unhappy after that, they can fill out a challenge form, which then prompts the school to put together a committee of readers, consisting of a school administrator, a representative from the DOE’s library system, and the librarian. If it’s a high school, some students will be invited to sit on the committee as well. The group then meets to discuss the book, its merits, and whether it actually belongs in the building. If the committee votes in favor of retaining the title, it cannot be challenged for another two years.
With such a robust system in place, few books end up getting removed—but librarians still absorb strong feelings from parents when they disagree with the reading material that’s been selected for their children. At the time we spoke, Lauren Harrison had worked as an elementary school librarian at a public school in the West Village for seven years. She said she stocked her shelves with the popular titles of the moment—all the Dog Man books, The Baby-sitters Club updated graphic novels—as well as inclusive picture books for early readers, like My Own Way: Celebrating Gender Freedom for Kids; Our Skin: A First Conversation About Race; and Antiracist Baby. Given the demographics of the families who attend her school, Harrison said she was surprised when she received feedback from a mom that her book selections were “too gay.” She recalled getting an angry email after reading the picture book Our Subway Baby—based on author Peter Mercurio’s real-life experience of finding an abandoned baby on the New York City subway and ultimately adopting him with his husband—aloud to the students. Harrison dismissed the email as “ridiculous,” with her principal’s blessing. “I loved that book, the kids loved it, they fought over who got to borrow it,” she said. “It’s offensive to me that that book’s offensive to you.”
Harrison’s mother, Carol Waxman, is also a librarian and has worked in the Connecticut public library system for almost forty years. She had a harrowing experience after she helped plan West Hartford’s first drag queen story time in the summer of 2022.
Waxman was enthusiastic about hosting the event as part of a larger local Pride celebration, especially given the town’s “very active Pride community.” But as soon as the story time was scheduled, the blowback started. “Well, it ended up being so controversial and difficult. Letters, phone calls, people came in to see me, furious,” Waxman remembered. She was shaken up by it, “because some of the letters to me were threatening. ‘This is on you, your career is at stake, you’re gonna throw everything away because of this,’ ” people were telling her. The town’s mayor and manager also received rage-filled correspondences, all from older citizens who stressed that they’d never, ever let their grandchildren attend an event hosted by drag queens. Reluctantly, officials made the decision to move the reading outside, in light of the threats of violence and vandalism against the library. And when it became clear that the event might need a rain plan, a nearby Barnes & Noble stepped up and offered to absorb it. “I went over to see it and it was packed,” Waxman said.
She noted—as Blume has, too—that this moment’s increased appetite for censorship isn’t coming exclusively from the Right. Blume experienced this firsthand in April 2023 after expressing solidarity with J.K. Rowling, who has borne the brunt of major social media pile-ons due to her outspoken anti-trans views. Public response was so negative that Judy issued an aggrieved statement on X (then Twitter) clarifying that “I wholly support the trans community. My point, which was taken out of context, is that I can empathize with a writer—or person—who has been harassed online.”
Then there were the sanitized versions of Roald Dahl’s books that struck up a frenzy in the winter of 2023. That February, UK conservative broadsheet the Telegraph reported that “Augustus Gloop is no longer fat, Mrs. Twit is no longer fearfully ugly, and the Oompa Loompas have gone gender-neutral in new editions of Roald Dahl’s beloved stories.” Dahl’s publisher, with the blessing of the Dahl estate, had scrubbed potentially offensive descriptions and passages from his famous books, presumably to appease today’s more sensitive readers, with Gloop going from “enormously fat” to just “enormous,” and the Cloud-Men in James and the Giant Peach becoming Cloud-People, for instance. But the response was mixed at best; PEN America criticized the move, and oft-censored author Salman Rushdie tweeted that Puffin Books and Dahl’s descendants “should be ashamed.” Puffin later announced that it would continue to publish “classic” versions of Dahl’s novels, giving contemporary readers a choice between the two.
Waxman said that she keeps her collection up to date, which at times means retiring titles that no longer fit in with cultural norms. She said any children’s books that depict guns—which used to be unremarkable—are now “taboo, completely taboo” in the age of mass shootings. Same goes for illustrations that show adults smoking cigarettes. Waxman also mentioned Lois Lenski, an author and illustrator who published award-winning children’s books in the 1930s and 1940s. Waxman would “never” recommend them for young readers today, she said, because of their outmoded depictions of gender roles within families. “The mother is always home, never works, always wearing a dress, always home cleaning the house,” Waxman said. “I’m very aware of those books now, not that anybody is going to tell me to ban them, but they’re just not in good taste.” (People have compared this process, called “weeding” in the library biz, to banning books but it’s a false equivalency. Weeding is about unshelving titles that have been rendered irrelevant by the culture. Banning is about cutting off access to books that are contributing to current cultural conversations in the hopes that these conversations will stop.)
“It’s really scary being a librarian right now,” LaVerde confessed, given high levels of polarization and the aggression with which citizens express and defend their personal views. “It’s really scary being an educator,” she went on, “which is weird, because it’s something I would never in my entire career of thirty-plus years think I would say.” LaVerde conceded that “honestly, in New York, we’re luckier. But I think about my colleagues in Florida, in Texas, who are being threatened, not only to lose their certification, their license, their pensions, their careers, but they’re being threatened with bodily harm.” Politics, religion, and the concurrent racial justice and transgender rights movements have all crashed together in a shockingly painful collision over… books, of all things. But LaVerde thinks stories for kids are so contentious not only because they tend our children’s nascent moral fibers but also because they uproot our deepest fears as parents—that in being exposed to increasingly mature topics, our kids will become independent and leave us to lead their own lives.
“Parents don’t want to admit that their children are growing up,” she said. “It hurts.”
Nevertheless, she’s strongly opposed to book bans and believes that reading about our differences—whether they’re cultural, racial, or involving sexual orientation—actually builds empathy by reminding us that we all share the same human experiences. “Your struggles are a little bit different [than a character’s] but you know what? The kid in rural Mississippi is fighting with his mom to go to a sleepover, and me in New York City, I’m fighting with my mom, she’s not letting me go to a sleepover, either,” LaVerde said, channeling a young reader’s point of view.
School librarian Julia Loving said that she makes a priority of reminding her students that access to a wide range of books is a privilege, even in the age of social media, where kids often tell her that reading takes too long and is “boring.”
Loving recently responded to this sentiment by sharing her own history with them—about her parents, who migrated to New York City from the Jim Crow South because they wanted their children to have better opportunities than they had. About her great-great-grandparents, who Loving found out could read and write when she dug into her genealogical roots. That surprised her. She told her upper schoolers that literacy was rare among Black people in Virginia in the late nineteenth century. She asked the students if they had any idea why that might be.
“They said, ‘Well, they couldn’t read or write because maybe many of them had been enslaved, right? Because that was something that was illegal to do, educate enslaved people,’ ” Loving recalled someone saying. “And so I asked them, ‘Out of all things in the world, why would someone want another human being not to know how to actually read and write?’ And one of the kids said, ‘Well, you keep them from power, you strip them of their power.’ ”
Knowledge is power, reading is power, and for the first time since the 1980s, today’s kids are caught up in a multidirectional adult power-play over the kinds of books they should be allowed to slip into their backpacks and quietly enjoy in their bedrooms. Loving said her personal share made a visible impact. “I always say, the reason [to have] inclusivity and diversity in our collections, and definitely having our kids have access to books, is because of the power that can be gained from them,” Loving explained. “They can take you places that you’ve never been, can teach you how to do this or that… in those scenarios, why would you not want to read? Because you have to realize that there’s something to this reading thing.”
Chapter Twenty-Five Legacy
“We didn’t have the internet; we didn’t have any places where we could find the answers.”
In the 1981 Christian Science Monitor article, there’s a quote about Blume that feels kind of ridiculous now. It came from Mary Burns, then a professor of children’s literature at Framingham State College in Massachusetts. Burns told the reporter that “in every age… there are books that answer the needs of the moment, and Judy Blume’s books seem to be fulfilling that need. But you can’t equate popularity with quality, nor quality with popularity. The question that needs to be asked now is: will Judy Blume’s books be as popular 20 years from now?”
Okay, it sounds silly in hindsight, especially given the flash flood of love and gratitude that has washed over Blume these past few years. But Burns wasn’t entirely off base. Kids aren’t reaching for Blume’s novels as frequently as they were in the 1980s and 1990s. Julia Loving noted that while she keeps all the Judy Blume books in her library, they don’t circulate nearly as much as they used to. Carol Waxman agreed. These days, she said, it’s mostly parents of young children who are checking out Blume’s books, wanting to share beloved characters like Fudge and Margaret and Deenie with the next generation. Less often, it’s the kids themselves who are plucking them off the shelves. They’re reaching instead for graphic novels and Captain Underpants.
But whether Blume’s work stands the test of time is an entirely different conversation. You only need to spend a few hours reading Superfudge with a second grader to appreciate the perennial appeal of her writing. “Bonjour, stupid!” still unleashes a tiny bellyful of giggles. Also, the challenges kids face remain largely unchanged. Parents are still getting divorced. Elementary schoolers still get diagnosed with scoliosis and require intervention. Bullies terrorize their classmates; best friends laugh and sob and struggle. The competitive friendship dynamics between Margaret and Nancy remain true to life, with or without the intrusion of iPads and cell phones.
And we, the pre-internet generation, genuinely needed Judy Blume. She was dropping nuggets of truth and wisdom that kids couldn’t get anywhere else at the time. Yes, if we were lucky, we had some sex ed in school, and yes, a fifth grader could steal her parents’ copy of The Joy of Sex and smuggle it into a birthday party the way a classmate of mine did in 1992 (she was caught and everyone got reprimanded and sent home). But it wasn’t the same. “The way that sex education is usually done is to put up one picture of a female body and one picture of a male body, which already scientifically is not enough,” Cory Silverberg said of the heteronormative approach to sex ed that dominated the twentieth century. That’s something, but it’s not gender- or orientation-inclusive and it’s not meeting children at their level.
It’s just another spin on the eggs and moon talk Judy got in the 1950s from her dad.
What’s still missing from a lot of contemporary sex ed is an exploration of the way sex intersects with relationships, experts say. Even today, very few parents and educators are prepared to discuss the way dynamics of care and safety and vulnerability all contribute to true intimacy, which is crucial for a satisfying love life. That’s what Judy innately understood how to do. She taught us about our bodies and our hearts through her stories. Periods are something that happens to a whole friend group. First teenage love affects the entire family. Boys experience heartbreak, too! Truly safe intercourse requires talking and planning. You can’t go back to holding hands.
Sex educator Shannon Dressler brings this perspective to the classroom in her own work with middle- and high school–aged kids. Consent, desire, pleasure, respect—these are all parts of a successful partnership, and children need to be taught what that looks like. “It’s really helping [students] learn how to have healthy relationships, where you’re feeling good about the relationships and connections you have with others,” she said of ideal sex ed curriculums. The Netflix show Sex Education, featuring fictional British teens discovering their passions, peccadillos, and hang-ups, does this well. It’s all about bringing context to the body and the bedroom. That’s what Blume did for her readers back in the day. “We didn’t have the internet; we didn’t have any places where we could find the answers. Her books were certainly a beginning point,” Dressler said.
Now kids have the opposite problem—they’re glutted with information.
“These kids have access to so much,” Dressler continued. By pretending that there’s only one right way to have sex, within the realm of heterosexual marriage, abstinence-only programs just leave kids and teens with more questions. Then, when they “try to find the answers on their own,” they get lost “in spaces and places that actually aren’t giving them the right information,” Dressler explained, alluding to the maelstrom of free porn swirling on the web. OnlyFans and Pornhub are quite a bit less wholesome than Deenie and Forever—not that they’re doing remotely the same thing. Kids today have quicker access to graphic sexual images and videos than any previous generation, and just like in the wake of the sexual revolution, adults have a responsibility to confront this challenge head-on. The right kind of education, Dressler said, actually helps inoculate children from the virus of a hyper-sexed culture: “These are all protective factors that we need to put in place in young people as early as possible as they move through the complexities of life.”
Proper sex education needs to start early, and it’s not necessarily about explaining the mechanics of reproduction, Silverberg agreed. “I get why parents don’t want to talk about where babies come from, because they don’t want to talk about intercourse with their four- and five-year-olds. Why are we talking about intercourse with four- and five-year-olds? If a four- or five-year-old wants to know how a sperm and egg meet, that’s fine, it’s not harmful to them, but it’s also not in any way relevant to them.” What is relevant to them—or will be so much sooner than conception—is what it feels like to have a body that’s constantly in flux, in a world where allusions to sex are all around, all the time, in songs, on billboards, in television commercials, and on YouTube. “Kids are [watching] movies and have feelings about things. Kids overhear other older siblings listening to music. Kids know about advertising. They hear other kids say stuff about gender,” Silverberg said.
They need to learn how to process all these stimuli through their own eyes and not through the eyes of a pedantic adult, Silverberg went on. “We’re figuring out ways to help young people learn, in their own way, in their own path, in a way that honors all the things that they already know,” Silverberg said of their colorful comic-style books with artist Fiona Smyth. “When you’re seven, you’ve lived a lifetime in your seven-year-old body and nobody knows what that’s like other than you.”
Judy Blume understood that. She got it, instinctively, and was able to authentically channel a pre-teen’s perspective better than anyone else could. That was the thrust and the sparkle of her talent.
Her genius, if you will.
The literary gatekeepers finally started to recognize Blume’s unique contribution. Ironically, the relentless attacks on her books in the 1980s served to put her in a category with the world’s finest writers. In 1989, after Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa against Salman Rushdie, authors gathered at the Atlanta-Fulton central library to read aloud from The Satanic Verses, as well as other frequently banned books, including Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and Blume’s novels.
Before that, in November 1987, the then-forty-nine-year-old Judy was dubbed a Library Lion by the New York Public Library, among a class of fellow honorees that included Raymond Carver, Mary McCarthy, and Harold Pinter. On a Wednesday night, Blume flitted among the city’s literati—and its stylish upper crust—for a decadent dinner of beef Stroganoff in the ornate Stephen A. Schwarzman Building’s Special Collections room, heralded by trumpets. The author of popular children’s books, who had been dismissed for so long as a purveyor of addictive, junky pseudo-literature, accepted a gold medallion strung from a red ribbon around her neck. Fashion designer Bill Blass chaired the event; Jacqueline Onassis, Brooke Astor, and Oscar de la Renta were among the posh crowd, cheering her on.
Judy had something else to celebrate that night: she was a newlywed. Before they tied the knot, she and George had lived together for the better part of a decade. They’d sold the house in Santa Fe and moved back to New York City, buying a country home in western Connecticut.
She had been wary of marriage given her past experiences, but by then she was sure about George. On June 6, 1987, just a week after his fiftieth birthday, the longtime couple gathered their family and friends for an informal wedding on their Upper West Side terrace. A female judge, a friend, performed the nuptials. The rings came from a street fair on Broadway. Larry bought his mother a mixed bouquet of white flowers to hold.
Essie Sussman lived to see her daughter get married again but died that August of pneumonia, at the age of eighty-three. In Presenting Judy Blume, Judy said that she was grateful her mom was there to witness her exchanging vows with George. “She always said, ‘I should only live to see this wedding,’ ” Blume said. “And she did.”
By the time she turned fifty herself in February of 1988, the most difficult years of Judy’s life were behind her. It also marked the end of a roiling, tumultuous, wildly productive stretch when Blume wrote the books she’d be best known for. “I used to think that when my kids grew up, then I could really focus on my writing,” she said at an event in 2015. “Instead, it’s kind of been the opposite. You know, I got happy. And writing comes of angst,” she explained, before quickly assuring the audience: “I can still conjure it up, don’t worry.”
Judy got happy. She called up her angst when she had to, for work, but she unleashed her joy into many other things—marriage, friendship, a midlife passion for tap dancing. In the early 1990s, Randy gave birth to a baby boy and Judy became a besotted grandmother. She took up water sports at Martha’s Vineyard, and later, she and George fell in love with Key West, Florida, where they’d eventually live full-time and invest in a bustling bookstore.
Committed feminist that she was, she never stopped talking publicly about puberty, or menstruation, or sex. As the now-octogenarian Blume likes to point out, the pleasurable things we can do with our bodies are an integral part of our human existence. And shouldn’t we all be making the most of our short time on earth, delighting in these amazing and awkward physical forms? Judy has written as she has lived: wholeheartedly. Chasing, embracing, pinning down experience—and gathering it up again, so very full.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to David Halpern, who is the best agent I could ask for and an even better friend. Thank you to my editor, Julia Cheiffetz, who I’ve been lucky to work with twice and who is one of my all-time favorite collaborators. Thank you to Nick Ciani, Abby Mohr, Hannah Frankel, and Joanna Pinsker at One Signal for believing in this book and helping me bring it out into the world. Thank you to Laywan Kwan for the gorgeous cover design. Thank you to my longtime pal and production editor Liz Byer for taking such good care of the manuscript.
Thank you to the people who generously shared their time and their thoughts, making this a sharper, more nuanced project than anything I could have done on my own: Dean Butler, Michael Dishnow, Shannon Dressler, Michelle Fine, Jennifer Fleissner, Karen Fleshman, Lauren Harrison, Suzanne Kahn, Arlene LaVerde, Rachel Lotus, Julia Loving, Peter Silsbee, Cory Silverberg, Roger Sutton, Carol Waxman, and Jonathan Zimmerman.
